Midnight in Paris - Review

If you were to tell me the plot of Midnight in Paris and then tell me if I would be interested in seeing it, I would tell you that it sounds incredibly sappy and uninteresting. Why would I want to see a movie about a guy walking around Paris and goes back in time to fall in love with a french girl? This sounds like a movie for lonely women past the age of 40. However, to my surprise this isn't just a good movie, it's an amazing one. For some reason, this movie hit me on quite a few levels. First off, you have Owen Wilson who is always likable as our main character. He is extremely relatable because he always is looking into the past and imagining how great it would have been to be a part of it. I know I wish sometimes that I had grown up in the 80's or at least had been a bit older to experience the 90's a bit longer. Owen Wilson's Gil wants to live in a simpler time and he feels like he isn't doing anything exciting with his life. Engaged to a woman who is obsessed with the now, unhappy with his Hollywood hack screenwriting job, he wishes he was living in Paris in the 1920's. One night while stranded in the streets of Paris, he travels back in time and meets all these famous people. Now, I know it still sounds like a story you'd see on some big paperback novel in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart, but what sets this apart are the performances by the whole cast, especially Owen Wilson who I think is even Oscar-worthy here, the comedic writing of Woody Allen and the very mature themes that this film addresses. We all may long for a time that we consider the golden age, but people living in that so-called "golden age" wish they belonged to another time period and so on and so forth. We all cling to this idea of a great past. Some may say that that won't help you in any situation in life, but this movie tells us that it is okay to long for the past, but also do what you want to do in the present. If you are unhappy, change it. On top of that, the romance is very well-done. Although Owen Wilson is traveling through time, this movie feels very real in how people interact with each other and speak. Also, the scenes in the past just seem so fun. Everybody seems like they are having the time of their lives. This is a movie that not only leaves you with a smile on your face, but it makes you think. Better yet, it doesn't give you a depressing look on life, it gives you an optimistic one, and in my eyes, that is exactly what going to the movies is all about.